


Convergency

by apolesen



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Childhood, Holocaust, M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-01
Updated: 2011-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolesen/pseuds/apolesen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The meeting between Charles and Erik is a convergency of childhood memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Convergency

I.  
The camp was a silent place. There was constant noise - screams and thuds and crying - but none of it truly meant anything. Later in his life, Erik could not remember having spoken to anyone apart from Schmidt during the year after his mother’s death. Some of the guards, assistants and other doctors must have spoken to him at some point, but he always recalled them as distant. Perhaps they simply did not dare to - he was after all branded Schmidt’s pet, and that gave him some form of twisted protection. On reflection, the term “pet” was particularly appropriate, because Schmidt treated him like a talented dog, who performed when beaten. He would even take Erik on walks, the doctor’s hand on his neck half-protective, half-threatening, both to show off the other officers his price experiment, and show Erik the alternative to his success.

The dull-eyed shadows which inhabited the camp were hard to conceive of as people. They had been stripped of their souls, made uniform and empty. Yet they spoke, often in a language Erik could no longer understand. He watched as hundreds of them took their clothes off and folded them on the ground with the care of those who owned little. Their voices were hushed, but he could make out the words even from where he stood, and recognised them as Yiddish. For a moment, the part of him which could articulate feelings and thoughts, buried in the place where he had hid the love for his mother, flickered to life, only to go out again. He was empty. It was as if Schmidt had, intentionally or not, cut or snapped something during his experiments, not inside his body but inside his mind, because he could no longer speak his mother tongue, and he could not shout out when the vulnerable naked bodies willingly walked into the showers. Schmidt’s grip tightened as the door banged shut and the workers collected the neatly folded clothes. Erik saw one of the boys, not much older than him, glare at him as he reached down towards the ground. The next moment, he shouted something - it must be a term of abuse, but he did not understand - and his arm moved back and then forward. The small stone which he had picked up hit Erik in the face, but he did not hear his own shout of surprise for the screams from the showers. He did not notice the trickle of blood running into his eye or the guard tackling the boy to the ground or Schmidt’s nod to fire, because all he could hear was the banging on the door and the pleads of help, and then the stillness, which never seemed to end. Until then, death had seemed noisy and messy. Now, it was routine. The body of the executed worker became simply another in the crematoria and the firepits along with the newly dead from the gas-chambers.

‘You’ll be good, won’t you? Like your mother would have wanted you to?’ Schmidt asked him when he guided him back. Erik nodded, despite wanting to tear the doctor limb from limb for mentioning his mother. At some point, he may have be strong enough to do it, but now the emptiness in him was too large. He could not even understand his own mother-tongue. German had become his only language now, but it was only a means of commands, orders and evaluation. The beauty of language was gone, its creative spark extinguished.

From what Erik had gathered, he was considered too dangerous to keep with other people. They wanted to keep him away from any metal he might use, to break free or kill someone, or for that matter himself. Therefore, they kept him in a small room, almost a cupboard, closed by a wooden bolt, in the barracks where the children kept for experiments lived. As he pressed against the walls, he could hear them. He knew he would be able to draw the nails out of the planks and get free, but they would find someone to kill even for that trespass. The silence around him grew stronger with the awareness that outside, there were people who had still to die.

It took many months before it dawned on Schmidt what the silence and loneliness was doing to his test-subject; it could kill as effectively as hunger. Even if the doctor was intent on tormenting the boy, he needed him alive. Schmidt’s solution was unorthodox but ingenious. It was not handed over with any ceremony, not even introduced. The door to the cupboard simply opened and the guard kicked it in, so that it yelped and jumped away when the door slammed. Erik, curled up in his corner, looked in wonderment at the creature they had let into his domain. It was a gold-furred puppy, with a wet nose and floppy, soft ears. He had not touched anything alive since they had torn him from his mother. Feeling clumsy, he reached out for it, and even if it struggled, he took it up and hugged it. He could tell it was afraid, because it yelped again and started scratching against his chest, but he held it tightly, and tried to whisper calming things to it in Yiddish, as his mother had done to him when he was little, but the words were gone. Instead, he simply made noises at it, which it answered, and finally it cuddled up in the crook of his neck. Erik held it close the whole night until dawn came, amazed that something so soft and colourful still existed in the world.

Shortly after dawn, the door opened a crack, and a tray with a lone bowl of unidentifiable food was shoved into the cell. He had stopped feeling hunger months ago, but knew that weakening himself would have worse consequences than eating the stuff. Besides, it was more than they gave the people in the rest of the camp. Letting go of the little dog, he picked up the bowl and ate the contents with his hands. When had finished, the dog approached again, wagging its tail and licking his grimy fingers. It struck Erik suddenly that they had not given the dog anything to eat, and by the way it licked off the grey muck, he could tell that it had not been fed. He could not share his food with it, however soft and sweet it was. Watching it eat, Erik stroked it and buried his face in its fur. Then he straightened up and, still aware of the soft hairs under his fingers, put both hands around its neck and gave a tug and a twist. The little creature went limp at once. He threw the carcass away from him and curled up again, waiting to be fetched by the guards.

 

II.  
Charles had never had any friends before Raven. His mother had seen to that he was given no opportunity to speak to anyone outside of a strict social context, and making friends when water-combed and constantly guarded was impossible. When his mother’s shape melted into the body of the little blue girl, he had been so desperate to keep her there that he had used the power to persuade his mother to let her stay. Over the following years, Charles realised what friendship was. He taught her to control her gift, even when he did not know how to control his own. He told her how they moved to America, and how he wanted to go back to Britain. He spoke of the war, reporting new offensives and turn-of-events to her as to a commanding officer.

(‘Do you want to fight?’ she asked one day. Charles folded the newspaper neatly in his lap to stall for time.

‘Never,’ he answered quietly. ‘It’s wrong.’ It was not the whole truth.)

More than anything, he spoke of his father, whom he could not mention in front of his mother anymore. Charles’ existence was the only part of that past she still bore to think about, and even that occasionally seemed doubtful. He remembered papa vaguely; he not recall the sound of his voice, only the grating cough which the gas had burned into his lungs. Charles sometimes wondered if it was his affinity to his father, that communication which went beyond sight, which had sparked his gift. Once or twice, he had even wondered if his father had had a similar power, because he had known things without seeing them, like where walls and stairs and open doors were. That romantic idea had disappeared when he had asked his mother about the reason to it, and she had curtly answered:

‘Change in air-pressure.’

When he had read more on the subject of human senses, he knew that it was true. His father had simply adapted to his new circumstances after the gas attack by developing his other senses to make up for the one he had lost. There was a beauty in that, Charles supposed, and some comfort, considering that it was the death of his father which had started the change in his own perception.

When papa’s frail health finally broke, Charles kept feeling a dull, constant pain. He tried to tell his mother, but she had little time for her son or for her husband, apparently wanting her time as nurse for an invalid to be over. Waving it away, she told him that sometimes when you are upset, you hurt. Charles knew that, even at the age of six, but this was not a headache or a tummy ache, like the kind you get when you had a lot on your mind. It was in his lungs, like the pain papa was in. As Charles sat at his bedside and touched papa’s hand, he thought he could hear a whispering voice, but from where he could not tell. He watched his father tossing and turning in bed, dying a death which should have happened in the trenches, but had been drawn out over eighteen years. During his vigil, the little boy fell asleep, and dreamt of the pounding of the machine-guns and rain-water leaking into his boots. He heard sounds of battle and smelled of blood sinking into the dirt. When he woke, it was with a scream, just as his father came to with a shout also.

‘What’s wrong, Charles? Hush...’ Wheezing with the effort just to move his arms, the man had reached out for him and pulled him close. Charles climbed onto the bed and rested his head on papa’s chest. As those deft hands stroked his hair, he felt a sudden rush of love, stronger than he ever felt, but it did not come from inside himself. He was just about to raise his head, as if to look for its source, when the body underneath his suddenly tensed and the hand in his hair clenched, tugging at his scalp.

 _God, no! Not when he’s here. Must breathe, must breathe... I don’t want it to hurt... Jesus Christ, not when my son..._

The hand in his hair went limp, and Charles looked up to see his father’s head fall back on the pillow. He had felt his father’s mind go out, and from the rest of the house, he felt the thought of every person in it.

 

III.  
Charles was thirteen when the war ended, and when it could no longer be used as an argument, his mother gave in and arranged for him to be sent to school in Britain. Raven would go too, to a less expensive girls’ school down the road from the school which three generations of Xaviers had attended. She was not particularly pleased, but she was glad to go with Charles. Even if she did not like the idea of leaving America, being stuck there if her brother went over the Atlantic was unthinkable.

The crossing was unpleasant. Neither of them suffered from seasickness, but Charles was unable to leave his bed, the thoughts of all eight hundred and seventy-four people onboard echoing in his head.

‘It’s never been this bad before,’ he complained, grabbing his head. Raven was sitting on the side of the bed swinging her legs and leafing through a book. He found it hard focusing his eyes on her; he kept hearing the panicked thoughts of a woman who once nearly drowned, a man who had worked on redirecting allied convoys from German submarines during the war, a little girl listening to her parents fighting...

‘It’s probably the strain of leaving home,’ she said lightly. When he did not answer, she sighed and put the book away to shuffle to the top of the bed. None too gently, she made him lay his head in her lap and started rubbing his temples. ‘It’s just the jitters.’

‘Yes,’ he said weakly. ‘That must be right.’ He knew that it was not, but he could not tell Raven that, because he would not dare to tell her the real reason. Puberty had started in earnest, and this was what it was doing to him.

When he arrived to the school, not unlike the mansion but much older, fresh thoughts assaulted him. As the teacher who had met him led him through the building to the headmaster’s office, he looked around in awe. He had never seen so many children in one place. Their minds all shouted at him, craving his attention. When the headmaster saw him, Charles felt genuine worry from the old man, who asked if he was quite alright. He said he was, even if he was afraid he would faint with the strain of the din.

Teenage boys, Charles learnt, think very loudly. In his own head, things tended to turn in to a din, but now he saw that it was not because of his gift, or at least not completely. In Chapel and in assembly, even when all the pupils kept quite quiet (which was seldom anyway), it sounded to Charles as if they were all screaming at the top of their lungs. When he was in the library, the people on the other side of the bookshelves might as well have spoken loudly, and they would have disturbed him less. Stuffing his ears did not help, and training himself was difficult, even if he understood soon that he had to. Even when he managed to put up some kind of defence, there was no guarantee that it would hold. A particularly loud train of thought could still break through it, and if he lost his concentration, his guard was easily broken.

A thousand subjects was considered every day. Families, classes, language, games, the news, rationing, sweets, birthdays, friends, the dead... But no subject seemed as prevalent as sex. Charles was surprised at how people obsessed over it - even the gown-clad teachers seemed not to be able to keep their mind off it. While the class laboured with their Catullus, the teacher was compulsively thinking about the word _passer_ and imagining women undressing and showing theirs to him. During maths, the withered old man who taught them thought about the escapades of his youth. When the headmaster spoke in Chapel, he kept thinking about a young man he had met in an air-raid shelter in London, and what had transpired later, and now he was terrified that he would stray from the script in front of him and say something of that encounter instead. What terrified Charles the most, however, was that it was not only the boys and the teachers who kept thinking about it. The part of his mind which was still only him kept returning to the same subject constantly.

 

IV.  
Charles seemed to have so much of other people’s fantasies in his head that sometimes he did not quite know which ones were his own. First came a desperate need of being touched - just a hand on the shoulder, feet meeting under a table. He kept feeling people’s minds, but he wanted to feel their bodies, to know that they were real and alive - touching concentrated his powers on that one person’s thoughts.

Charles had no friends, only acquaintances, who merely tolerated him. The only time he really could touch was during games. Even if he was quite small, he turned out to be good at rugby, and he delighted in the tackling and the mud. It helped him break out of the prison his mind could become. The animal drive of sex, which he did not know how to answer, was easily sublimated into socially accepted violence, a base aggression redressed as a character-building exercise. But it did not change the fact that however much sports he did, he still had a nigh uncontrollable urge to reach out and touch people. It was a new sensation - it had never been like that with Raven, and still was not, when he met her in the weekends. Equally, when they ran into some of the other girls at her school (all of whom she hated with a passion), the urge to feel their skin under his fingers, although present, was never as strong, even if he also heard their minds rage at him. With girls, he was in control, but with boys, there was something savagely unpredictable about his urges.

The nights were worst. Eight boys shared the dorm, and after lights-out, they all kept quiet, trying not to disturb each other or be caught by the prefect. But there was no silence for Charles. He knew who touched themselves, and what they thought about. Even those who did not do anything still thought about it. Over the part few months, he had realised how differently people approached the subject. There was Jenkins (two beds to the left), who kept thinking about Cook’s breasts. There was Gibbons (opposite side, one bed down), who desperately tried not to think about anything naked, but ran a rehearsed fantasy of pre-Raphaelite imagery, but the coy girl tried to turn lecherous against his will. And Crimmon-Smith...

Crimmon-Smith, in the bed next to his, was thinking about Charles.

Finally one night, when he was certain most of the boys were asleep, he gave in. He did not know Crimmon-Smith, and they had not really spoken properly. Still now, he left his own bed and slipped into the other boy’s. That need to feel that he was a real, physical presence in the midst of all those _thoughts_ flared up. Crimmon-Smith offered him no greeting, only moved to give him room. They kissed carefully, as if fearing to break the brittle silence, and without meeting each others’ eyes they touched. It was a great relief, but nevertheless it hurt. They were resting their foreheads together, and Crimmon-Smith’s thoughts were seeping through his skull into Charles’. He was so relieved, but there burned a sense of shame in him. He wanted and did not want, and did not wish to want. Suddenly his mind was ugly, and the want burned too strongly. Charles shied away, withdrawing his hand and his mind and leaving the bed without a word.

As he climbed into his bed again, he made a decision. He needed to learn how to control his power. If he did not, he did not want to contemplate what would happen. If the telepathy did not drive him mad, the need for being touched - simply touched - would. He would hone his mind so that he would not hear others’ thoughts when he did not want to, and he would gain control over his body. Its whims must be possible to override with the mind. Strengthened in his resolve, he decided to be his own master.

 

V.  
Erik no longer believed in the concept of a soul. Before the war, he had been devout. Now religion was a delusion. Had anyone ever had a soul, they, whoever they were, had lost it when the Endlösung was proposed. Had G-d ever existed, He had died along with the first prisoners led to the showers. Life was only a mechanism, and death was merely the termination of that mechanism. He could not remember a time before the yellow star on his lapel and the ghetto and the camp. When he thought of his mother, he only saw her pained face when they had lead her into Schmidt’s office. Even when he closed his eyes and plugged his ears, he could not recall what his father looked like. All he was was what Schmidt had made him into. Schmidt had formed Erik into the desired shape in the same way as he had made him shape metal. He functioned, he did not live. The only life which was meaningful was that which had been taken, and that which awaited being taken.

Then suddenly new evidence presented itself. He had been so close to Schmidt, and he could not let go, even when he was dragged deeper into the water. All that existed now was the submarine and the ocean around him, deepening...

And then there were arms around him, and inside his head, a soul - someone else’s soul. It whispered to him, calming his anger, and touched the wizened husk that had once been his self, or so he named it, unwilling to think that it was a soul...

His saviour was red-lipped and blue-eyed, the colour contrasts reminiscent of the face of a painted porcelain doll. Still his boyish appearance did not look breakable. There was a strength of mind which shone through his wide eyes, and Erik felt captivated by that gaze. This man radiated something which Erik had forgotten, something he had no name for. It was the kind of word which the year with Schmidt had erased from his vocabulary.

The sun seemed to shine differently the following days. He felt him tugging at his senses, as if Charles were made not of porcelain, as he had first imagined, but of some elegant metal. Constantly, he felt the man’s thoughts reaching out, but not forcing themselves into his head. Instead, they stopped and seemed to hover at the edge of his mind, mindful not to penetrate a boundary he had already breached. Erik was still reeling with the discovery that Charles had shown him, and the discovery that Charles himself had been. He was not alone, he had said. Erik had forgotten that he had been alone before. How can one forget such a thing? How long had he gone without speaking to a person for real, or _wanting_ to touch, not just needing it? Briefly, he even wondered if his search for Schmidt had done as much damage as Schmidt himself. Schmidt was still to blame, of course, but something had shifted within Erik. Before, his hatred against the man who had killed his mother had been all he had felt. Now, there was something new, directed towards Charles, yet another word he could not remember.

It was during one of their recruitment trips when the organic magnetism between them grew too strong, and they finally touched. Erik tried and to remember when he had last felt such tenderness. Their hands joined, and even if they both knew that they were going to kiss, neither dared to make the first move. Erik had to force some of his usual assertiveness to return in order to break the lengthy stare and bring their lips together. He heard Charles gasp as he had done when they had broken the surface and felt his mouth move compulsively against his own. There was an uncharacteristic agitation in Charles’ actions as he pressed himself closer and raised his hands, placing them on his shoulders. Erik mirrored him and as the kiss deepened, a memory which was not a memory suddenly struck him. He remembered lying beside his mother’s body, his head propped up on her unmoving chest, but that had never happened. Startled, he took a step back and they stared at each other. Charles’ eyes had gone blank with tears. Their minds had touched - for a moment, two corresponding memories had converged. As if with sudden relief, Charles exhaled and smiled. He was letting his guard down - the smile was an offer of trust. It was the act of showing that he was vulnerable, and that he still opened up to him. He did not know if anyone ever had dared to do that to him.

And at once Erik remembered the little golden-furred dog. He recalled how its neck had crushed and its spinal-cord snapped in his grip. It had been the first creature he had killed without using metal. His hand was still resting against Charles’ neck, and the soft hairs in his nape reminded him of how the puppy’s fur had felt against his fingers. He stroked those hairs, and Charles, as unwitting as the dog had been, leaned in and kissed him again. Erik kissed back, cherishing the fact that here was vulnerable flesh which he had no reason and no wish to harm. But still he had killed the dog - he could not even remember why. Perhaps simply because he could - because, already then, it was all he knew how to do. _Things are changing,_ he told himself. _They must be. Because I will never harm him._


End file.
